Just say no to +universal

[James Berry]

On Mar 3, 2007, at 5:06 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

>> Rather than big hacks on individual ports, it would seem better to  
>> have a couple of declarative statements for the universal strategy  
>> of a port:
>>
>> 	- port may be built universal: yes/no
>> 	- port builds universal out of box: yes/no
>> 	- port builds in single pass with flags: xxx
>> 	- port can be built in multiple passes by lipoing together the  
>> following binaries... (all others are assumed the same builds)
>
> I'm not sure what value is added by having so many states.  I  
> think, as far as the builder is concerned, the only state that  
> counts for anything is the first one.  Does it build universal?   
> Yes?  OK, then the builder can choose to build it universal if  
> that's valuable to them.  If not, then it's a moot point.   As far  
> as an internal macports developer is concerned, there's also not a  
> lot of value in splitting hairs here.  If it builds universal out  
> of the box vs tweaking it, that's great, but it's no different than  
> having a port which compiles on MacOSX with no patches and respects  
> $prefix properly in all ways vs one which has to be coerced into  
> doing those things.   Whether to lipo or not depends as much on  
> what the macports developer wants to do (e.g. how much trouble to  
> go through in the "coercion process") as anything else, so I don't  
> see what value a declarative statement adds there either.

As always, my mind was racing ahead to implementation ;) What I was  
thinking out, though I didn't clearly say so, was what syntax we  
might need to add to portfiles to support building software  
universally in a more general fashion than having a separate  
implementation for each port. The user doesn't care about any of  
that, surely, except for #1.

James